Calculating the Home Team Advantage

Bali Chapter of the Indonesian Association on Tourism (GIPI) is urging the provincial government to begin accumulating accurate data on domestic visitors to Bali. To date, the amount of meaningful data on domestic visitors, who represent the single largest source of tourist visitors, is almost non-existent.

Quoted by BeritaBali.com, the Chairman of GIPI, Ngurah Wijaya, said that data on domestic tourists is needed to evaluate Bali’s large tourism industry. He added that such data is essential to evaluate Bali’s infrastructure and carrying capacity.

“By recording such data, we will be to know the capacity of supporting elements in Bali and how many rooms we need. We have also discussed how much accommodation there actually is in Bali and how many restaurants? This is the data we lack,” said Wijaya.

Wijaya said the current estimate that there are 4 million domestic tourists to Bali each year is little more than a rough calculation.

Ngurah Wijaya bemoaned the difficulty of obtaining data on domestic tourist visitors to Bali. To date, the data on domestic visitors is limited to extrapolations based on traffic through Bali’s Ngurah Rai International Airport. These figures do not contemplate the large number of domestic tourists arriving through the ports of Gilimanuk, Padang Bai and Benoa.